Google AdWords is Google advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads . The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.

Yahoo Search Marketing exsist in the shadow of Adwords, however still drives a susbstantial amount of targeted volume to advetisers sites. Yahoo is currently getting ready to switch over to a new user interface and ad serving system called "Panama". Panama will work like Google and actually have some cool features that users have not seen before. The Current user interface and ad serving system has lots of quirks that tend to frustrate new users. When first starrtgin out on Yahoo it is very important to set a small daily budget.

MSN is new to the paid search game. To put it bluntly it is a giant pain in the ass to get anything accomplished using thier interfaces. It does not have the ease of usability that Adwords & Panama both have. However the traffic is high quality and you need to find an way to get on it. MSN adcenter is always improving and will get to the point where it is a major player in search.

Ask.com is close to be pushed into the major engines category however there is still some issues with usability that will not allow advertisers to set up larger more complex accounts. Ask has used traditional means of advertising to boost its presence as a search option for people. Ask is set up to become a major player and will most likely brinng your site high quality traffic; however it is comparble in cost per click to the major players and one should be careful when getting listings live on ask.

IFindit-Quick.com is in my opinon the best performing 2nd tier engine. The business is run by account manager who get back to you and are extremely helpful. They have great traffic distribution and they fly below the radar and do not have people in the industry giving them the proper endorsements at every conference. This engine is a gem, it is cheap as hell and ususally will give you a great ROAS.(Return on Ad Spend)

Miva can actually deliver tons of volume, sometimes too much however if optimized it can be a good source of web traffic. It does offer something called AdAnalyzer which is a conversion tracking tool. The key to taming this engine is turning off the MIVA match option. Miva match is similar to google broad match in concept however since Miva does not measure click through rate your ads can spend lots of cash with little return. As long as you trun of this MIVA match option it does drive a decent amount of quality traffic to your site.